Rediscover a forgotten beauty, which seems to have fallen into oblivion, in order to sing out the human love between man and woman in the contemporary world: this is the mission entrusted to Christ' disciples by the successor of Peter at the General Audience on April 15th, as he continued the series of reflections on the family with the first of two catechesis on the difference of the sexes. This is the Creator's wonderful plan, which we can admire in the ''large symbolic fresco" of the Biblical narrative. This text shows that the sexual difference of human beings is not simply a biological fact, but the bearer of the ''image and likeness of God." Starting with this contemplation of man's truth in the eyes of the One who has made the human person "male and female" (Gen 1:27), we can announce the kerygma that society so direly needs.
The sexual difference between man and the woman indicates the human person's vocation to self-transcendence and the gift of self; this is possible when the solitary "I" opens up to a relational "you and a communion of "we" is established that reflects the love of the Triune God. This communion reveals that the human person is constitutively a being for others, a being for the relationship in which the difference becomes the space for the alliance between man and woman, lived in mutual interdependence between two complementary human beings and as a response "for communion and generation, always in the image and likeness of God."
Moreover, considering that sexuality is an affective energy base that pushes a person to open up to interpersonal relationships, it becomes a language through which man and woman express their total gift of self. Respect for the sexual difference, therefore, facilitates and ensures the passage from passionate love (which is often enslaving) to self-giving love. Speaking about this passage, the Holy Father offered this advice to the young: "Do not let this precious treasure be debased, destroyed or spoiled. That is what happens when we start to use our neighbours for our own selfish ends, even as objects of pleasure" (Message for the 30th World Youth Day, January 31st, 2015). Through self-formation to the love of agape, the human being will be able to break the inseparable link between Eros and Thanatos, which is the cause of so much frustration for contemporary man.
Herein lies the foundation of human goods that help man and woman to "solve the problems in their relationship."
In a society apparently suffering from a kind of "anthropological" illiteracy, which does not allow it to grasp the deep vocation of the human communion, the Word of God becomes, for the faithful, the diagnostic criterion for identifying the causes of a certain "malaise" in human relationships and the principle of action for proposing a remedy. This is the path that Pope Francis seems to be indicating with respect to the challenges of the new evangelization.
In the light of the original beauty, he wonders if gender theory "is not an expression of frustration and resignation that aims to eliminate sexual difference because some people can no longer deal with it." The crisis of the covenant between man and woman must also be grasped in its deep roots, as the offshoot of the "crisis of collective trust in God."
Only an accurate diagnosis, capable of indicating where the evil is that "hurts", allows the faithful to respond adequately to the current challenges of spousal love between man and woman. It is the beauty of God's Word, the proclamation of the human being—"male and female"—as the image of God, which facilitates the promotion of the effort of the faithful, and of all people who care about the human being, to propose the beauty of the human love grounded in Jesus Christ's God-Love. Touched and animated by this Good News, a horizon of infinite possibilities opens before us, beginning with those that the Holy Father has pointed out: in-depth study—especially in the intellectual world—of the subject of sexual difference; finding creative and daring ways to give greater importance to the role of women and to their genius in society and in the Church; witnessing in the world to the beauty of the project of the Creator "who also inscribed the image of God in the covenant between man and woman."
As the Church advances towards the upcoming Synod, the Holy Father urges us to return to the Word of God, and to know how to draw from there "the new and the old" (Mt 13:52) for a new evangelization of the family.
Msgr. Mario Grech
Bishop of Gozo
President of the Maltese Episcopal Conference
